


All That Glitters

by Miss_M



Category: The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (2008)
Genre: Angst, Canon Continuation, F/M, First Kiss, Minor Injuries, Period Typical Attitudes, With A Twist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-04 03:35:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12762285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: “I’m not against you, Fisher.”“But are you with me, Jimmy? Are youwithme?”





	All That Glitters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Minim Calibre (minim_calibre)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/minim_calibre/gifts).



> Hope this is as Tennessee Williams-esque as you wanted!
> 
> I own nothing.

Fisher did not wait to see if Jimmy followed her inside. She stepped out of her slippers in the foyer and hurried through to her aunt’s private parlor in stockinged feet, rushing on tiptoe, as light and tense as a ballerina. The earrings felt like they were burning her hip, nestled as they were in her coat pocket. She had felt too jittery to put them back in, after leaving Miss Addie and rejoining Jimmy in the car, after everything that had happened that evening.

She did not turn on a light, didn’t need or want one to get rid of the cursed things. She had the earrings in her left hand and her right hand on the tiny desk drawer, only to find the drawer locked. 

“Oh blazes!” Fisher said sharply, but not too loudly. She wished to be interrupted neither by Jimmy nor by Aunt Fisher. She could not deal with the former’s distant gallantry or the latter’s censorious bemusement just then.

She tugged on the drawer, but it remained steadfastly shut. 

Fisher dropped her left hand to the desktop, rapping it dully with her fist curled around the earrings. A small, sharp pain across her palm made her gasp and open her hand while reaching for the desk lamp’s switch. 

The center of her palm bloomed red, flooding her life line. The edge of one of the diamonds was stained red and black with blood and dirt. 

By the light of the lamp, Fisher could see something she had not spotted before, in the dark of Julie’s driveway, when that awful slattern Vinnie had returned the lost earring to her: a jagged chip was missing from the edge of the diamond, and a faint yet unmistakable crack had appeared inside it, like a tiny iceberg breaking up from within.

Fisher tried to wipe the diamond clean with her fingers, but succeeded only in spotting her leopard-skin coat with the blood dripping from her palm. She heaved a frustrated sigh, hiked up the edge of her party dress, staining _that_ in turn, and wiped the earring clean before holding it up to the light, inspecting the crack, the chipped edge.

Now that she could see them clearly, as she could not before, she noticed what a tawdry thing they were, those earrings. Worth ten thousand dollars? Ha! Aunt Fisher genuinely might have picked them up at Woolworths, only Fisher was certain her aunt had paid good money to a discreet jeweler to have the replicas made. Appearances were all that mattered, when all else was gone. Fisher wondered idly how many cups of black coffee and glasses of bourbon, how many tins of sugared violets and pots of face powder, how many pairs of silk stockings and cotton gloves the real diamonds had paid for, and how long that money had stretched. She wondered…

“Fisher?” Jimmy’s voice, muffled so as not to rouse the household.

“I’m coming,” Fisher replied. “Don’t come in here!”

She pushed the earrings under the blotter, out of sight despite the obvious lump on the desktop, switched off the lamp, and returned to Jimmy, who waited in the foyer with the lights on.

“Fisher, what… You’re bleeding!”

She looked down, noticed the smeared hem of her dress, the single red dot on the polished floorboards. Susie would be mad when she woke up…

Fisher’s heart jumped straight up into her throat like a leaping frog when Jimmy stepped close to her – so close that she felt his warm breath on her cheek – took her wrist between his long fingers, and raised her hand to his eyes. 

“How’d you manage this?” he asked, not unkindly, but she bridled at the suggestion that she always spoiled everything.

“I cut myself on my sharp wit!”

Fisher was about to snatch her hand back, but Jimmy was moving toward the kitchen, taking her with him. It wasn’t until they were standing side by side in front of the sink, Jimmy running cold water over her palm and the moon shining in on them through the window, that she mustered the presence of mind to pull away from him so abruptly he took a step back, away from her. 

“Hell, Fisher! What’s the matter with you?”

“Don’t touch me,” she said, refusing to look at him, refusing to let him see the tears prickling in her eyes.

“How’re you gonna bandage your own hand without my help? Huh? I’ll have to touch you for a little bit.”

“Nobody touches me,” Fisher said, turned off the tap, and wrapped one of Susie’s snow-white dish towels around her smarting hand. “Nobody’s ever, ever touched me! Not ever! Not that titled Italian with his limp hands and his stench of cologne, not anybody! I keep going to the colored quarter in Memphis, I drink and I dance, all alone, and no one, no one that I would want to… People either resent me, or they’re scared of me. No one ever comes near me, ‘cept the colored girls, they trail their hands over me when they pass me in the street, groups of them, like they’re a stream and I’m a rock and they part and brush past me, sneering. Nobody else ever touches me.”

Fisher caught her breath and twisted the dish towel into a knot, till it clung painfully to the wound on her palm. She kept her head down, staring at her stockinged feet and the floor. She hadn’t meant to say all that. _That_ was not what she wanted to say to Jimmy. 

Jimmy’s voice sounded tentative when he spoke at long last. _Careful, careful, you never know what the madwoman might do_ , Fisher was thinking wryly when his words reached her.

“You shouldn’t do that anymore, Fisher. You shouldn’t go to those places on your own. It ain’t safe.”

Fisher cringed at his solicitude. She looked up, confident he’d ascribe her shiny eyes to the combined effect of the moonlight and her anger. “Safe? You’re right. What _would_ the neighbors think of you if they knew what kind of girl you’ve been escorting to parties?”

Jimmy’s nostrils flared, and his hands curled into loose fists by his sides. Fisher wished vaguely that he’d strike her, so they’d both know where they stood at last. 

“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” Jimmy said, keeping his voice down with visible effort. “I meant it ain’t safe for you to be courting trouble like that. Why must you always make everything so difficult, Fisher? You practically begged me to hold you back at the levee, and now you’ve turned all wild. Everything’s a struggle with you.”

“‘Cause I’m fighting like hell just to hold on, else the river’ll swallow me, like those people my daddy…”

Jimmy raised a hand, as if to ward off a snarling dog. “Don’t…”

“… _killed_!” Fisher said fiercely, feeling her own viciousness like silk against her skin. “Like those people my daddy killed. Every living soul from Memphis to Vermilion Bay has said it about him, called that spade a spade. Well there, I said it too, and look: world’s still turning, house didn’t fall down around our ears, you and me’re still here.”

Jimmy raised both hands, found no purpose for them, let them drop. “I’m not against you, Fisher.”

As sudden as the passing of a summer rainstorm, Fisher found her anger transformed into something else. Something dark and burning. She took a step toward Jimmy, clutching her injured hand in her good one before her chest. She had wished so badly for Jimmy to know her, but he still knew only the hard, shiny shell she presented to the world.

“But are you with me, Jimmy? Are you _with_ me?” Fisher took a deep breath, and she lied: “I don’t even care if it’s only for my money, or the money Aunt Fisher may leave to me or may leave to the Episcopal Church, whatever sum that may be. So it may as well be just for me, such as I am.”

Jimmy was watching her in that way he had, like he was hovering on the edge of feeling tender toward her and couldn’t quite screw up his courage to step off that edge. “Do you want me to be with you?” he asked.

He’d asked her that, in so many words, in front of Julie Fenstermaker’s house, when he’d been angry with her and in no state to believe her when she’d said yes. Now he was asking it of her like the only answer he could imagine was coyness, even crueler than a no. 

“Yes!” Fisher all but snapped. “How much plainer can I make it? I want you with me, Jimmy. I want you with me and I want me with you. I want it more than I want Paris or Venice or anything else in the world.”

“Even more than your aunt’s diamond earrings?” He said it like a joke, but his voice came out all hard and sharp-edged. 

Fisher turned away, hiding her face again, her anguish like a stone in her chest. “Oh those damn earrings!” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jimmy shake his head at the blasphemy coming from her. It gave her a small, mean flicker of pleasure, but it did not impede the flow of words bursting out of her. “I wish I’d never laid eyes on the wretched things! Jimmy, if you only knew…”

“Knew what? Fisher?” His voice drew closer. Surely he was close enough now to touch her. “Knew what?”

When she told him, as she knew she would have to, he would be angry again at what he’d perceived as her suspecting him of theft. Yet it would be a secret the two of them shared as well. And secrets had power, like being told one was wanted by another human being had power. Maybe it even had more power than five million dollars or whatever Aunt Fisher’s estate really was, whatever the house and the furnishings were worth, those that were not replicas and impostors, like the earrings that auntie had made such a fuss about. Fisher felt like the whole house in which they stood was made of cardboard and would collapse at the first spatter of summer rain. Fisher’s daddy had money too, or so he led Fisher and the world to believe, but Fisher and he were not on speaking terms and Fisher wore the assumption that he’d cut her out of his will like a badge of pride, though the world called it foolishness and obstinacy. 

The truth seemed somehow less terrible once Fisher allowed herself to imagine it. There might be no money at all, for anything: travel to Europe, or nice clothes, or a better hospital for Jimmy’s mother. ( _You never completely return._ ) Fisher wondered whether this was what people meant when they whispered with malicious relish about families that had come down in the world. She supposed _that_ , at least, was one thing she and Jimmy had in common. One secret shame they already shared.

She turned and faced Jimmy, who hovered by her side, still not touching her. She rested her injured, throbbing hand on the edge of the sink and laid her good hand on Jimmy’s cheek. The pain of her wound and the startling smoothness of his skin pierced her together. 

“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” Fisher said, as sincerely as she’d ever said anything in her life, “but only if you stay here tonight. Propriety is a waste of time, but I’ll make allowances for you. You may have the same guest bedroom where you stayed before, and then we’ll breakfast together and I’ll tell you about the earrings.”

Jimmy did not move, neither closer to nor away from her. Fisher waited, unmoving. Her raised arm trembled, but her hand on his cheek did not.

“You think it’s wise I should stay here tonight?” Jimmy asked, like he wanted her to persuade him but he would not persuade himself.

Fisher removed her hand from his cheek but did not move away from him. She wanted Jimmy to feel the warmth coming off her, smell her perfume and cigarette smoke, see her eyes shining in the moonlight. 

“I don’t think it’s wise and I don’t think it’s foolish. I just know I couldn’t stand having you sleep under any other roof tonight. If you’re worried about your daddy being on his own, I’ll ring the telegraph office and wake Joseph and have him run a message to your house…”

“It ain’t that.” Jimmy shoved his hands in his pockets, like he feared his strength of will would fail him in her close proximity. “It’s just… A lot’s happened tonight, Fisher. The air’s thick with events, like moths around a light. I don’t know what to think.”

Fisher did not move – she put all of her heart into her words, so that her voice embraced Jimmy and held him close, as she herself did not dare to do. 

“Then don’t think. Don’t think, Jimmy.” Her voice implored him to make a choice. “There’s too much thinking in life and too little feeling. You’ll sleep in the guestroom, and I’ll sleep in my room. And tomorrow will be a bright and sunny day, and we’ll talk.”

Slowly, and not at once, Jimmy nodded, looking into her shining eyes. 

Jimmy took off his shoes and left them by the front door before he followed Fisher upstairs. He tried to take her into the bathroom, to find a bandage for her hand, but she showed him the thin red cut already closing, looking raw and angry yet also like something in need of protection. It would heal and leave a faint scar only Fisher would know about. She left the white kitchen towel, soaked through with her blood, in the sink, like a bedsheet hung out of a castle window after a maiden’s wedding night.

On the landing in front of the bathroom, Fisher remembered that their rooms were at opposite ends of the hallway. She faced Jimmy again, saw him still watching her, still waiting for her to give him a cue as to how he should behave. 

They had not kissed, up on the levee, with the moon on the river and on them. The moment had been too fraught for that, too fragile. 

Holding her breath, Fisher came close, and closer, until her lower thighs were touching Jimmy’s knees and she could see, by the light from downstairs, the pulse beating hard in his throat. 

She rose up on tiptoe, as easy and tense as a ballerina, and pressed her lips to his. She counted one Mississippi, two Mississippi, and then she felt Jimmy’s exhale on her face, felt his lips press hers, not parting, warm and firm against hers. She let her eyes drift shut then, let herself inhale him, feel the kiss down to the pit of her stomach. 

They parted and took a step back each, surveilling each other like soldiers across a battlefield. Fisher saw that Jimmy’s mouth was stained crimson with her lipstick. She wanted to reach across the space between them and wipe his mouth clean with her fingertips, but she did not dare, not yet, and she wriggled inside with glee at the thought of Jimmy finding lipstick from his own lips smeared on his pillow in the morning, Jimmy catching his reflection with rouged lips in the shaving glass.

“Goodnight, Jimmy,” Fisher said.

His voice was soft. “Goodnight, Fisher.”

They went each their separate way then, closed their respective doors with the quiet finality that a lock clicking shut in a silent house at night conveyed. Only it didn’t feel like something closing, never to be opened or revisited again. 

In the morning, Fisher would know once and for all what she was worth. Despite that weighing on her, her and Jimmy’s exchange of goodnights felt less like a parting than a promise, something gossamer and precious that Fisher could wrap around herself and let it lull her to exhausted sleep. Better than opium, better than hooch and music, better than any dream of a beautiful life elsewhere.


End file.
